Pressure Release

Charlie woke up with a start. She sat up on the couch and looked at the kitchen, the source of the sound. “Holy crap!” she shouted. The kitchen was covered in lemon basil chicken. And glass. “Wha-?” she asked, trying to figure out the source of the glass.

Oh, right, the window. The pressure cooker’s lid had gone clear through the window, shattering it all over her kitchen and dining room. And probably the street below. She really hoped that no one had been under that. And a morbid part of her wondered just how far the lid had traveled.

But now was not the time for that. She had more pressing concerns. She sighed, running her fingers through her ebony curls as she began looking around for her broom.

A few days earlier, she’d been at her store’s monthly meeting when the assistant store manager, Jerry, had stood up and walked to the front of the breakroom table. “Alright, everyone, now it’s time for the part you’ve all been waiting for!” Jerry was the epitome of the overly enthusiastic manager. If she was being honest, he looked like he should be the owner of a bookstore or something, not the manager of a T-Mart in the poor part of Chicago. The man wore a sweater vest, for crying out loud.

Charlie had never found out what the T stood for.  She’d asked someone once, but they just guessed it stood for “Trade” or something. Not that it mattered. It was a regional chain that filled the void when all the bigger stores moved out of that part of town.

“Our employee of the month for October IS – drumroll please! – Charlie, from Layaway!”

Well, that had been unexpected. Considering that basically nothing had gone right for her since she’d gotten back from her tour in Afghanistan, Charlie had been a little surprised at that. It wasn’t much, of course. But it was something.

It wasn’t the job in engineering her degree had promised her. It wasn’t her reconnecting with the family who had been mad at her for enlisting in “the military that keeps the rest of the world oppressed”. It wasn’t even an extra two hundred bucks to make her next car payment. 

It wouldn’t stop the nightmares. It wouldn’t help her cope with what had happened. It wouldn’t make her forget, even for a second, the eyes of the man she’d killed. Nor would it help her forget the charred woman, Hollyn, she’d found when she’d managed to pry open the cockpit of that downed plane.

But it at least made her feel like someone recognized her efforts. It was something.

And it came with an hour long, one hundred dollar shopping spree with one of the managers – on the clock, at that.

After the meeting, Jerry had walked with her through the store. “I really don’t know what to get,” she told him.

“Then perhaps I can make a suggestion, my girl?” he asked.

She’d shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

He’d taken her down to Housewares and stopped right in front of the pressure cookers. “This is just the thing,” he said. “They save so much time. I couldn’t live without mine.”

“Aren’t those things dangerous?”

He made a dismissive sound. “Only if you don’t follow the instructions. But treat them right, and I guarantee they’ll treat you right. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that if you take one home tonight, along with my world famous lemon chicken recipe, and make it on your next day off, it’ll change your life forever.”

She laughed bitterly as she thought back to that conversation. The only thing that was likely changed forever was the smell of this apartment. It would always smell like lemon. She was sure of that.

She dumped the dustpan full of glass in the trash and looked out the window. She was eight stories up. All it would take was a bit of a running start and a leap, and all her pain, her trite, meaningless existence, would be over and she would be at peace.

She shook her head and got back to sweeping. She’d been having thoughts like that for a while now. She’d be passing the painkillers at work and wonder if it would take one or two bottles to do it. Once, she’d almost run into traffic. There’s no way that bus could have stopped.

But at the last second, she’d managed to control the impulse.

It was after that she’d finally gotten rid of the revolver she’d kept in her nightstand. In her state, she was certain that it was far more likely she’d use it to take her own life than to stop an intruder. So she’d had it properly disposed of.

As she worked, her attention kept drifting to the window. She told herself that she was just trying to figure out how to deal with it until she could have the super look at it in the morning. But that wasn’t it. She kept thinking about jumping. It would be so easy. She just had to start running…

Her train of thought was interrupted by a sound. “Meow!” it screeched emphatically.

She realized she had already risen to her feet. A second more and she would have begun running. She looked around the room. “Where did you come from?” she asked the intruder, a tan and brown Himalayan cat that was sitting on the back of her sofa.

“Merow,” the cat answered.

“Right,” she said. “I’m a damn fool, thinking a cat’s gonna answer me back. Of course it came in from the window.” Of course, that didn’t explain why it was up on the eighth floor ledge. She approached it and it watched her with mild curiosity. “You don’t have a collar, girl? Oh, it looks like you cut yourself on the glass!”

There was a bit of blood on the back of the couch. It seemed to be coming from the cat’s front left paw. Charlie grabbed the first aid kit. The cat, for her part, just watched the young woman.

“Okay, I’m gonna look for any glass fragments in your paw,” Charlie said to the cat, her voice soothing. “Just please be calm and don’t claw me, okay?”

“Meow,” the cat responded, disinterested.

The animal sat perfectly still as she checked it out. Luckily there didn’t seem to be any shards of glass embedded in the cat’s paw. Still, it could get infected. “I’m gonna put some of this liquid bandage on there,” she told the cat. “I’m sorry, it might sting a little.”

The cat tilted her head, but said nothing. When Charlie sprayed the wound, the feline flinched, but almost seemed to understand that what was being done was to help her. Then Charlie wrapped the wound in gauze to keep the cat from licking it, which was also strangely tolerated.

“All done!” Charlie declared. “Now, let’s get you a treat for being such a good patient. Hrm…I don’t have any cat food, but I’d bet you’d like some canned chicken, wouldn’t you, girl?” The cat meowed enthusiastically.

She got her new friend some canned chicken in a paper bowl and got back to cleaning up.

As she worked, her thoughts once more turned dark. Before she knew it, she had a jagged piece of glass in her hand, and she was staring at the inside of her forearm, fixated on the pulsing artery.

There was a hiss and suddenly everything went dark. The only light in the room was moonlight, which was streaming in through the broken window. In the center of the moonlight was the cat, her back arched and her fur standing straight up. She was looking at Charlie.

No, not at Charlie. Directly behind Charlie. A knot in the pit of her stomach, the young woman slowly turned.

When she saw it, she tried to scream, but the sound wouldn’t come out, her breath stolen by the cold, lifeless eyes. It looked exactly like him. Like the Taliban fighter she’d killed.

They’d gotten a call that one of their own fighters had been shot down. So her unit had gone on a rescue mission to retrieve the pilot in the dead of night, hopefully alive, though no radio contact had been established. But the enemy had been waiting for them. An IED had taken out the lead Humvee. And then the fighters swarmed them.

One of the bastards had gotten real close. He had a knife, and he was behind her sergeant, ready to strike. She she’d put a bullet in his head.

It was the first and only time she’d killed someone. She saw his face every time she closed her eyes. Him and the corpse of the woman they’d been too late to rescue. Hollyn had been her name. Charlie had seen her on the base a few times. But she was long dead. They’d come all that way, had lost half a dozen good men, all for nothing.

And now she was seeing the face of the man she’d killed once more. Only, now her eyes were wide open, and his were filled with hate.

The cat hissed once more and leapt onto Charlie’s shoulder, using her as a springboard before pouncing on the apparition’s face. It shouldn’t have been possible, but the cat’s good claw connected, tearing into the non-flesh of the ghost.

The phantom let out a wail as the cat swiped again and again. After a dozen strikes, it dissipated, vanishing to nothingness.

The lights flickered back on and the cat limped over to Charlie. It batted her cheek softly with its good paw a couple times and meowed softly, almost as if it was telling her everything would be okay. Sobbing suddenly, she grabbed the cat and hugged it tightly.

But she wasn’t crying out of fear, or sadness. But relief. Charlie’s heart felt light for the first time since she’d returned from her deployment. “Thank you, Luna,” she breathed. She’d decided on the name the moment she’d seen the cat in the moonlight, though she hadn’t realized it at the time.

The cat purred approvingly, nuzzling her and licking away a tear.

The next morning, Charlie did something she hadn’t done in months. She opened up her laptop, made a few corrections on her resume, and posted it on a jobs site. By the time she’d taken Luna down to the vet to get her paw checked and a quick scan for a microchip – which resulted in a clean bill of health and no chip – Charlie had gotten her first hit on the resume. A quick phone call interview later, she had landed a job at a firm across town, one making more than five times what she was making at T-Mart.

She took Luna with her as she stopped by work to put in her two-week notice. Jerry was at the service desk when she came in, and he smiled at her beaming face. “Told you that my lemon chicken would change your life,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” she told him.

He reached out and scratched Luna behind the ear. The cat purred enthusiastically. “My girl, you’d be surprised at what I know. Now, it turns out that model I sold you had a faulty pressure release valve. So why don’t you go pick something else off the shelf, maybe something for the fuzzball, and I’ll get that return processed. And don’t worry about your two weeks. I’ll use your vacation time to cover it so you can have all the time you’ll need to find a new place. Looks like you’ll need to find a place that takes cats.”

Charlie stared in shock at him.  She hadn’t even had a chance to mention any of what had happened. How had he…?

Luna meowed, seeming to tell Charlie to focus. “Right. Let’s go down to the pet department and pick you up some things,” she said, completely forgetting her questions. Luna nuzzled her and the two set off.

Charlie didn’t even notice when Luna looked back over her shoulder. And she definitely didn’t see Jerry return the cat’s knowing gaze with a slight nod and a smile.